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Spam Traps: Ignorance is NOT Bliss

There is no doubt that email marketers already face a lot of challenges, but certainly one of the most frustrating is low delivery rates. A lot of hidden threats can negatively impact your deliverability. Find out what they are in this article.

Imagine how frustrating it is putting a ton of time and hard work into creating your next marketing campaign, growing your email list, only to have it blow up in your face when you hit the send button. Only then do you start to realize a big percentage of your subscribers may not have even received or seen your email. What happened? How can you help this potential ‘future you’ from experiencing this nightmare scenario?

Of all the potential hidden threats lurking in your email data, spam traps are the ones that generate the most questions and concerns. And rightfully so. In order to help, let’s take a deeper look at spam traps.

What is a Spam Trap?

So what exactly is a spam trap? It is a type of tool often used by organizations, ESP/ISPs, and blacklist providers to help identify potential bad actors or spam senders. Spam traps are bad emails and once a marketer is blacklisted due to hitting spam traps, then their good emails are either put into the spam box or do not get delivered at all. This is a big reason why it is so important to keep up with email list hygiene and stay away from buying third-party lists. Only email hygiene can detect spam traps beyond simple typos, and third-party email data can be rife with potential spam traps.

There are many spam traps out there include honeypots, typo traps, pristine traps, and recycled traps to name a few. These can all damage your sender reputation, leading to your sending domain being added to a blacklist, operated by a major ISP or 3rd party organization, permanently tarnishing your sender reputation.

How to identify a Spam Trap?

It is quite difficult to identify a spam trap, especially with so many different types out there. Many providers that specialize in email verification claim to detect typo spam traps by offering an email corrections service, but only email hygiene can detect all types.

Webbula cloudhygiene has an exclusive relationship with the world’s largest honeypot purveyor and has the technology to identify recycled and typo traps. We work together to detect harmful spam traps, something no other provider is capable of. Webbula will send you on your way to a successful campaign.

How do they end up on my list?

Great question and there are plenty of people who wonder the same thing. There are many different ways spam traps could end up on your list. Like an recycled email, typo, or purchased emails.

A recycled email could be someone who left a company and the email was deleted and eventually reactivated it as a spam trap.

Typos can be simple input mistakes that happen when typing out an email address, but unfortunately, that typo could be a spam trap that reports your email as spam. Which it technically is, since no opt-in occured between you and the owner of the email.

Which is the essential issue behind purchased lists. It’s important to realize that there are many types of potential spam traps hidden in purchased lists like seeded traps, harvested traps, and scraped traps. The best way to avoid these types of spam traps is to simply avoid buying lists! Instead, you should consider appending the data you need to your existing list to reveal additional connections to your customers. (Check out this blog on Data Appends for more information.)

Why should marketers care about Spam Traps?

If you are sending emails to spam traps it probably means that you do not follow a good list hygiene practice, or properly collect email addresses. A lack of effort in any of these could hurt your reputation with email providers and impact whether or not you can send or even reach your customer's inbox.

If you are an email marketer you could possibly be sending to spam trap emails right this very second. It’s hard to indicate between a good email and a spam trap, and having even one in your lists could cause you harm.

If you are sending to spam traps, take it as a sign that you should follow best practices to collect emails, and to update your list from those nasty spam trap threats. Inbox providers could mistake you for a spammer which could really hurt your sender reputation, and that could lead to your deliverability rate taking a real hit. Which can negatively impact your ability to generate sales and revenue.

How do I fix the problem?

Now that you understand what a spam trap really is and why they are in your list, let’s talk about how you can fix the problem. There are many email verification providers out there that can detect valid and invalid email addresses and also certain types of spam traps. But the truth is verification can only detect spam trap such as typo’s, what about all the others hiding in your lists? This is where email hygiene comes in.

Webbula cloudhygine can detect those hidden threats hiding in your emails. Not only spam traps, but malicious moles, bots, blacklisted emails, and much more. cloudHyiene is the smartest all-in-one email threat identification platform available, including email verification, email hygiene, and social media authentication. That is why you should give Webbula a call today, or check out our website webbula.com.

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